John Linton .....because what used to be called shame and humiliation he now calls "if you don't have absolute proof then I didn't do it and if you do have proof then it's a fake but if it isn't a fake it was done without my knowledge and if it has my name on it it was an error by my staff and if......." and gets the Federal Police to harass the person who quibbles with his definition. ...and that's all I have to say about that - despite trying to avoid Labor obfuscation all week end it proved impossible. (apologies to P J O'Rourke for the misquotation).
The real work of the weekend was finalising the ADSL plans for the first quarter of 2009 (which was continually disrupted by the breathless updates of Krudd's, Whine's and the screech owls utterances and a very indifferent Geelong performance) and assessing the various levels of risk we should take in changing the direction of our approach to the wire line broad band market opportunities that may exist now that were not evident (to us) over the past five years. Sounds all gobbledigook to you? Seemed that way to me until I went through what's being offered to the Australian broadband buyer for the goodness knows how manyth time....and then you realise what the problem is for the buyer of broadband services - they've gone the way of mobile services - there is almost no possible way for any "average" English language literate and relatively numerate buyer to actually figure out what they are getting and what it's going to cost compared to what they estimate their current requirements are, are actually using now let alone what they might need to use in the near future.....
.......and I used to think I knew a little bit about ADSL in its various forms. So I threw away all my previous iterations including the almost decided on plans and tried to start again basing new plans on simple (perhaps more correctly, simplistic) assumptions that there must be a market for people who have a budget and want to use the internet within that budget without having to worry about "bundling" anything in to their "overall" spend or being "tricked" into long contracts or all the other smoke and mirrors that make it impossible to actually buy a simple service.
I looked at Exetel's plans and how they were 'presented' and then I looked at 6 other ISPs and tried to tabulate a comparison. This proved impossible because of the (and I counted three times to be sure) 38 different 'assumptions' contained in the six different ISP's parameters for providing an ADSL1 or ADS2 service. By the time you combined all of the different ISP's 'funny symbol' qualifications it was impossible to do a comparison. So I did that only comparison that could make sense to an 'average' user - I 'normalised' all of the different plans (I looked at 68) to a once off set up cost including a wireless modem and then a cost per gigabyte of upload and download per month.(I included download costs for those ISPs who charge for both).
I then set the objectives of the new plans to 'beat' the lowest cost ISP plan in each category by 15% on monthly cost wherever that would not result in a loss by Exetel where Exetel was able to compete with a similar/same service. It took some 5 hours, I never can work quickly on things like this, to produce the information matrix and double check it against the information sources I was using. Then I was able to work out a new set of wire line broadband plans using the experience we have gained on providing PAYU plans over the past 9 months or so and the current statistics that show that well over 50% of Exetel's current users use less than 6 gb of downloads per month.
It then took 20 minutes to work out what they could be:
All plans include 6 gb of downloads (no peak/off peak) excess downloads at $1.25 per gb with 10 email accounts, 500 mb of web space and a fixed IP:
256k $30.00
512k $35.00
1500 $40.00
ADSL2 $40.00 (naked)
ADSL2 $35.00 (rent a telephone line from supplier of choice)
ADSL2 $50.00 (with rented telephone line included)
$50.00 activation for ADSL2 and $90.00 for ADSL1 new accounts and $0.00 for churn customers.
Simple really with no fine print and no funny symbols....and no contract. Only consideration would be whether or not to add some sort of off peak allowance - almost certainly necessary but inconsistent with the overall "ideal".
That really would be the correct way of offering ADSL services - clear/concise/no flim flam.Why do I feel so reluctant to pursue this very sensible path? Because it's just too different to present ADSL services without mis-direction and obfuscation and, it appears to me, that "honesty is the best policy" disappeared from residential communications service pricing a very long time ago. As with mobile telephone "plans" it seems that buyers and sellers of broadband services have reached the commercial version of an "armed truce" where both parties have agreed to a level of 'obfuscation' which although both parties recognise the lies they are prepared to tolerate them to pretend they are getting something they aren't.
So, if we decide to go ahead we will 'title' them something appropriate and will also prove a 'decision calculator' (that is a fancy name for entering a budget monthly spend and getting the speed/download options for that budget). There will also be a three 'warning system' that will bring up a block page at 1 gb, 500 mb and 100 mb telling the customer that charges apply once they have used their 6 gb. At 1.25 per gb 'excess' this approach should address a big chunk of the current broad band marketplace - or so I would have thought.
I think it the best way to present ADSL pricing but I probably won't be brave enough to carry it through. It was a good thought though on a wet and cold weekend.